Biker’s Temptation

The Whole Picture

Donovan talked for forty minutes.

He talked about Vera Callum and the seven cases she had quietly strangled over four years. He talked about the offshore accounts Eleanor used to fund Meridian’s expansion into two new states, accounts that ran through a shell company registered in Delaware under a name that would mean nothing to anyone who wasn’t looking for it. He talked about the warehouse in Clarksburg that served as the network’s primary redistribution point and the three local officials on Eleanor’s payroll who ensured nobody looked at it too closely.

He talked about Marcus Webb, Eleanor’s head of security, who had been tracking Wren since she left Ohio, not to retrieve her but to confirm she had arrived somewhere Eleanor approved of.

He talked, and the room listened, and by the time he finished, the table between us was covered in Jasper’s handwritten notes and Ryker had filled two pages on his laptop and even Griff, sitting at the far end with the particular stillness of a man serving a silent penance, had contributed three details that Donovan hadn’t known.

Kane leaned back in his chair when it was over. He looked at the ceiling for a moment, the way a man looks at a ceiling when he is organizing a very large number of things into a very specific order.

Then he looked at the table.

“The drive,” he said.

Jasper pulled up the imaging results on the laptop and turned the screen, so the room could see. “Forty-seven files. Encrypted, but not with anything current. The cipher is about six years old, which means it predates whatever Mercer is working with now. We can crack it.” He paused. “I can crack it. It will take a few hours.”

“Do it,” Kane said.

“Already started.”

Kane looked at Ryker. “Webb.”

“I can have a location on him by morning,” Ryker said. “He’s not trying to hide. He thinks we don’t know he exists.”

“Let him keep thinking about that.” Kane turned to Griff. “The east wing.”

Griff met his eyes. “Clean. I swept it myself an hour ago. Whatever signal was used to send that message, it didn’t come from there.”

“Which leaves the west corridor and the garage,” Asher said. It was the first time he had spoken in almost thirty minutes and the room weighted his words accordingly. “I’ll walk them.”

“Take someone with you,” Kane said.

Asher nodded and looked at me briefly as he stood, a look that carried something in it. I didn’t have a name for yet, and then he was gone.

Donovan placed both hands flat on the table. “What do you need from me?”

Kane considered him for a long moment. The consideration was not hostile. It was thorough.

“Vera Callum,” Kane said. “Can she be reached?”

“She can be reached. Whether she’ll listen is another question. She believes she is doing legitimate legal work. Finding out otherwise will not be a comfortable experience for her.”

“Comfortable isn’t the goal,” Kane said. “Her cooperation is.”

“Then someone will need to convince her that the alternative to cooperating is considerably worse than whatever Eleanor has been paying her.” Donovan paused. “That someone should not be me. She knows my name.”

“It won’t be you,” Kane said.

His eyes moved to me and then away again so quickly I might have imagined it, except that Jasper had seen it too, because I caught the slight tilt of his head in my direction.

“Not yet,” I said quietly. “Whatever you’re thinking. Not yet.”

Kane almost smiled. It was a small thing, barely there, but I was beginning to understand that, with Kane Voss, small things were the whole vocabulary.

“Not yet,” he agreed.

The meeting broke apart slowly, people moving with the particular focused energy of a group that has just been handed a plan and knows what its piece of it is. Ryker disappeared with his laptop. Griff went back to the east wing with two Saints I hadn’t learned the names of yet. Donovan sat where he was for a moment longer than everyone else, looking at his hands, before he stood and walked out without speaking.

Jasper stayed.

When it was just the two of us in the room, he closed his notebook and looked at me across the table.

“You handled that well,” he said.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You held the room together without anyone noticing you were doing it,” he said. “That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite difficult.”

I looked at him. Jasper was not a man who offered observations without meaning them. I had understood that within the first hour of knowing him and nothing since had changed my reading.

“Why does it feel like the walls are closing in even though we just got more information,” I said.

“Because information without action is just weight,” he said. “It’ll feel different once Jasper cracks the drive.”

“You just referred to yourself in third person.”

He blinked. Something that was unambiguously a smile crossed his face this time, faster than the last one but more real. “I do that when I’m tired.”

“How long have you been awake?”

“What day is it?”

I laughed before I could stop myself. It came out surprised and a little rough and Jasper looked at the sound of it like it was something he wanted to catalog.

“Get some sleep,” I said. “The drive will still be encrypted in the morning.”

He stood and gathered his notes and paused at the door. “Wren.”

I looked up.

“Whatever is on those forty-seven files,” he said, “we are going to be ready for it.”

He left, and I sat alone in the room for a while with the weight of forty-seven encrypted files and one hostile takeover and a network that stretched across three states pressing down on the table in front of me.

Then I stood up.

Because sitting under weight and being crushed by it were two different things and I had not come this far to let them become the same.